:''Use this page to discuss design and content changes to the '''[[{{MediaWiki:Mainpage}}|main page]]'''. For general wiki discussion, please visit the '''[[Project:Community Portal|Community Portal]]''' or '''[[Forum:Index|Forums]]'''.''

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:<center>''Use this page to discuss design and content changes to the '''[[{{MediaWiki:Mainpage}}|main page]]'''.</center>

Welcome to the ''Game of Thrones'' Wiki for the HBO television series of the same name. This Wiki is intended to act as a guide to the television series, not as a general resource for the novels. Those looking for a guide to the book series are referred to [http://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Main_PagetheWiki of Ice and Fire] maintained by the Westeros.org team, or the considerably less-developed [http://iceandfire.wikia.com/wiki/A_Song_of_Ice_and_Fire_Wiki Song of Ice and Fire Wikia].

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[[Talk:Game of Thrones Wiki/Pre-Season5Archive]]

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This Wiki is based on the premise that the ''Game of Thrones'' television series, despite apparently being a faithful adaptation of the books, will likely diverge from the novels in key areas, and indeed already has done so through the addition of new scenes and dialogue in the pilot, the removal of some minor characters and actors varying from the detail of the descriptions in the novels. For this reason pages should only be started about subjects once it is known they will be in the TV series. For example, whilst it is highly probable that the castle of Storm's End will appear in the TV series, we have not heard anything about it so far in relation to the TV series, so starting a page about it at this time would not be appropriate. On the other hand, we know that Winterfell appears as filming has already taken place there. However, the appearance, layout and history of the TV version of Winterfell will likely be different to that established in the books, and information from the books should not be used to describe the TV version ofWinterfell.

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==Time to gomobile==

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Thatsaid,thepresenceof a 'How the TV series differs from the books' section in the relevant articles is appopriate, but only if spoilers are avoided.

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[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4u2gPCtlAawTimetogomobile]

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Asthetelevisionserieswillnot debut until early 2011, this means that current articles will largely be broad articles about the series itself, backgroundinformationonactorsandbehind the scenes personnel, and notes on filming locations and dates.--[[User:Werthead|Werthead]] 14:16, June 24, 2010 (UTC)

To clarify article and link-creationpolicy,westilldon't know that everything in the books will be in the TV series. In fact, we know that Castle Darry has already been removed from the series (all the action that takes place there has been moved to either the Crossroads Inn or to Tywin's war camp), so there's no guarantee that places like Seagard, Stone Hedge etc will be mentioned in the show (and thus shouldn't be linked or covered on the wiki). At the same time, mentioning a unique place name and leaving it unlinked may be confusing. One possible answer would be to link those articles to the respective entry on the Wiki of Ice and Fire instead, but this would involve putting a spoiler warning after every such link, which could be tedious and messy. Thoughts?--[[User:Werthead|Werthead]] 11:33, February20, 2011 (UTC)

Xeanaddedalinkto the bookwikiin the fourthslotintheslider.Idon'tthinkweshouldbelinkingtothat(notthatmuchcontentandpossible*major*spoilers), but Idoagree that thesliderlookswierd with thefourthslotempty.

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Asthoseofyoureturning may have noticed, the Adminsgottogether with the WikiastaffafewmonthsbacktomakeanewWiki-SkinforSeason5-theskinshouldhavebeenupdatedfor Season 4 but wasnot,meaning that wegotstuckfor ''two years'' with thosestupidcharacter-headposters...with their dead fish-eyes staring out at us (they weren't good posters, why did we make them the wiki-skin?)

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At any rate, for the first time since the beginning of Season 3, we have a new Wiki-skin (I also rebuilt the top navigation bar some months ago).

Upuntilafewweeks ago we werebusysounfortunatelythetemplates were still grey-blue for white text, butnow we have black text, making them illegible - I finally got around to fixing that though, it should be fine now.

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:Agreed.AndthebookWikiaisprettydeadnow,if they'regoing to link to a book one, it should be to the Wiki of Ice and Fire hosted by the Westeros.org crew. My rec would be to a map of Westeros and a link on geography, exploring the Seven Kingdoms, that sort of thing :-) Great work from all the newcomers, by the way, it wasgetting lonely in here :-) Nice to have a new logo (from the Cyanide computer game, right?) as well, although we should replace it with the TVseries logo as soon as HBO settle on afinalversion --[[User:Werthead|Werthead]] 13:37, February 9, 2011 (UTC)

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'''However,Iwonderifthereareanyminortweaksweneed to make to it, given that it doesn'tdisplay with the sameproportions on everycomputerscreen.'''

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::Maybe make the fourth slide about the Cyanide game? I think it's worth covering on this wiki as well (not strictly connected to the show, but it's also out of AWoIaF's scope, and it will likely be heavily targeted at the show's viewers). [[User:Ausir|Ausir]]<sup>[[User talk:Ausir|(talk)]]</sup> 16:37, February 16, 2011 (UTC)

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:::Myideabehind the TV wiki was that we'd cover only things directly related to theTVseries,such as merchandise bearing the TV GoT and HBO logos. Thecomputergame is not based on the HBOseries, something I expect will be made clearer as we get closer to the game coming out (a bit like the time when there was LORD OF THE RINGS games coming out based separately on the books and the movies). In fact, if the TV series is a hit I suspect HBO will look at licensing out their own computer game based on the TV show. AWoIaF would be the correct venue for info on it, but they haven't done much in the way of creating pages based on merchandising yet. We could possibly mention it on a subsection of the book page, mentioning merchandising of various kinds, but I don't think it should get its own page as it is not affiliated directly with HBO (in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if people at HBO were debating asking them to change the name).--[[User:Werthead|Werthead]] 19:29, February 16, 2011(UTC)

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Wemayneed to postscreenshotsofthis. Whatdoes the wiki-skinlook like to everyoneelse?

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::::Well, I think it would make sense to expand this wiki's scope also to other licensed properties, not just the show or HBO-affiliated ones. I doubt that the AWoIaF community will have much interest in giving much of a focus to anything but the books themselves. But if you think it's a bad idea, I suppose we could set up a separate wiki for them. And I don't really see how HBO could force them to change the name - Martin holds the rights to that, and I doubt any of the non-HBO licensed products, like the board game, the computer game, the card game, etc. will be renamed (and they can be distinguished by "A Game of Thrones" vs. "Game of Thrones"). [[User:Ausir|Ausir]]<sup>[[User talk:Ausir|(talk)]]</sup> 22:38, February 16, 2011 (UTC)

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:::::I'llcheckwithRanto see what they want to do about pagesonmerchandising. Ifthey'renotkeenonit,maybewecoulddosomethingherethen;-) --[[User:Werthead|Werthead]] 15:25, February19,2011(UTC)

:::::According to Ran, the WoIaF is going to be handling merchandising, they just haven't gotten round to it yet. --[[User:Werthead|Werthead]] 11:33, February 20, 2011 (UTC)

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::::::I was actually thinking of repurposing the Ice and Fire wiki at Wikia as a wiki focused mainly on merchandising, video games, etc. since it clearly has no chance at competing with AWoIaF as a wiki focused on the books. By the way, would AWoIaF be open to a deeper partnership with this wiki, with e.g. links to each other on the main page, and on each character page etc. ("read more about Ned Stark in the TV series/in the books" links at the end of each article)? [[User:Ausir|Ausir]]<sup>[[User talk:Ausir|(talk)]]</sup> 22:16, February 21, 2011 (UTC)

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:::::::That is an excellent suggestion. We could keep the book pages (which already have info on different editions) but most of the character/house ones could go, or alternatively we could keep them with notes on how they are depicted in different media. I've already spoken to Ran about partnering AWoIaF and the GoT one and that's something in the works. Even better, I've been contacted by HBO directly and they may be interested in involving us in the marketing for the TV series in some manner. It also means we have a direct line to check up on issues. For example, I'm going to ask if we can use the screencaps that various fansites have taken from the trailers and teasers, as they would radically expand the number of photos on the wiki.--[[User:Werthead|Werthead]] 09:48, February 22, 2011 (UTC)

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==Spellcheckertestingworks==

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I'veseenother computers (at work, library) which are square - unlike my laptop - and don't display it well at all.

The front page consists of a main section on the left, and a sidebar on the right.

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Youneedtousepropergrammar:

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Currently,goingdowninthemain left column, we have:

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[http://gameofthrones.wikia.com/wiki/War_of_the_Five_Kings'''Warof the Five Kings–''']

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*Frontpageslider

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Season 2 is underway and war ravages the [http://gameofthrones.wikia.com/wiki/Seven_Kingdoms Seven Kingdoms]! Who are the five kings involved? What do we know about ''their'' forces? Read our article to find outmoreabouttheconflict.[[User:Glassonion0|Glassonion0]]

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*Welcome to GameofThronesWikimessage

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:Thank you for pointing out my error, I have corrected it.--[[User:Opark 77|Opark 77]]14:01,May15,2012(UTC)

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*Side-by-sidefirstandlastepisodelinks

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:Thankyoufornotbeing a Jack Ass about it, the Star Trek Wiki people are rude.[[User:Glassonion0|Glassonion0]]

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Obviouslythesestaywherethey are.

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==Screencaps==

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Thenwehave a series of collapsable navigation templates I made. Those take up some space but they greatly aid navigation and make it spiffy (actual content in the boxes, such as characters, is a separate matter).

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I have received permission via telephone call from HBO Marketing to use screencaps from the trailers, teasers and other released media to illustrate articles on the wiki. Screencaps can be used under the following restrictions: we don't go overboard with them (i.e. one per article, more only if necessary to illustrate different facets of the article), we don't use ones that are major spoilers for events later in the series (i.e. we don't use the screencaps of the Three-Eyed Crow until it's appeared on-screen) and we emphasise on the upload pages that all screencaps are HBO copyright. Also, whilst Marketing are okay with us using them, HBO Legal may have a different opinion and we must be willing to remove any or all screencaps at any time (but since HBO Legal are okay with the screencaps on the numerous other HBO Wikis, this is a highly unlikely eventuality). Ran at Westeros.org has also given us permission to use the screencaps that they take and put up on their GoT page, and we should acknowledge that as well. Beyond that we should be good to go :-) --[[User:Werthead|Werthead]] 15:02, March 2, 2011 (UTC)

Belowthatwehavetwolargesections that didn't fit earlier, butwhich aren't near the top. Random visitors to the front page who scroll down an inch or two will see the top of the blue navboxes and scroll down some more, but these are downthere.

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::Waiting forWesteros'sscreencapsofthelatestvideo.Wecanaddimagesof the Wall, but I doubt the very brief image of the Other will be usable (plus it's kind of spoilery). Any thoughts on the logo? Our current one is good, but Iwasthinkingof using the TV show's one. However, I note that other HBO Wikis don't use them (TRUE BLOOD deliberately uses another one), whilst other TV show wikis (like Memory Alpha for STAR TREK) do. Any preference?--[[User:Werthead|Werthead]] 21:37, March 4, 2011 (UTC)

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First,we'vegotslotsfortwofeaturedvideos-usealot of space, but generallyimportanttohave.

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==VideoEdits==

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Thenwe have a Poll (going to make a new one after the premiere) which takes up a lot of space, but is at the bottom of the page so anyone going down that far would be taking the time to read it -- I mean what's the other option? Make the poll "more visible" by putting it at the top? Displacing "most recent episode?" Silly.

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Replaced the 'First Full Trailer' with the official HBO version, which is higher in quality. Also put it on the front page, thought the YouTube still of Catelyn isn't great. :-) --[[User:Werthead|Werthead]] 21:37, March 4, 2011 (UTC)

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==RSSFeed==

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In the right hand column we have:

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What's wrong with the RSS feed on the front page? The page keep says it can't load it, but the feed is valid. I don't know the syntax of the RSS feed, if there is a bug there. --[[User:Starhop|Starhop]] 22:13, May 5, 2011 (UTC)

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:Seemstobeworking fine now, don't know if someone else fixed it. I am thinking we needto change the RSS feed, maybe to a dedicated news reel with posts from Westeros.org's TV page and maybe Winter is Coming's entries. We're picking up a lot of tangential stories on the front page feed which don't have much to do with the TV show. Unfortunately, I don't know anything at all about changing RSS feeds to do that.--[[User:Werthead|Werthead]] 14:57, May 7, 2011 (UTC)

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*Anadvertisementvideosquare we cannotcontrol, next to the slider (roughly)

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*Featured article (currently the Sand Snakes) - Good.

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==Newlogo needed ==

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Thenwehave:

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We've been using the Game of Thrones: Genesis logo for a while now, which was okay as a placeholder whilst HBO had not revealed the final logo for the TV series. However, using this logo now risks confusion between the TV series and the computer game, and of course the computer game logo is copyrighted by Cyanide and we do not have permission to use it. On the other hand, we do have permission from HBO to use screencaps and promo images, so using the TV logo should also be fine. I'll see if I can find a good version of it.--[[User:Werthead|Werthead]] 15:01, May 7, 2011 (UTC)

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*About Game of Thrones

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*Spoiler Policy

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*Latest News

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*Recent edits

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*Contributing info

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:Right,Ihaveapossiblegoodnewlogouploadedat Wiki.png, but I can't update the currentlogo which is set to Wiki-wordmark.png, not sure what the issue is there.Anyideas?--[[User:Werthead|Werthead]]15:36,May7,2011 (UTC)

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Therighthandcolumnonlyextendstothebottomof the videosection, the poll is belowthat(andthusuneven).

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:

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:We have already found a new logo. So new people reading this should disregard what is being written. Cheers [[user:LordofOnions|LordofOnions]] [[User_talk:LordofOnions|(Talk)]] 22:50, August 6, 2011 (UTC)

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==Spoilers==

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We can't just make the poll wider (even if we ''could'', with coding) because it's not as if the text is wrapped around multiple lines - that's just how much space one line questions take).

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Why are the characters listed on the front page as dead/alive? That is major spoilers for someone who hasn't read the books or hasn't seen all the episodes of the show yet. I don't think the characters should be grouped like this. I just started watching season 1 and now I know who will die. Thanks a lot. [[Special:Contributions/192.250.34.162|192.250.34.162]] 18:20, March 30, 2012 (UTC)

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Thewikiis up to date with the show.Wehavea [[Template:Spoiler Policy|spoiler policy]] that we follow to exclude books spoilers but we are not aiming to stay spoiler free for aired episodes of the show.I'm sorry you were spoiled but I think you should consider your browsing a bit more carefully while watching a season that first aired 9 months ago.--[[User:Opark 77|Opark 77]] 20:43, April 1,2012(UTC)

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Itmakessense to put the "Contributing"disclaimerstuffat the bottom,good.

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You know he has a very good point, right? I mean,I'vebeenwatching since episodeone and havereadallthebooksso, ona personal level, I'mnotworriedabouthaving anything spoiled for myself. However, it should be expected that people who may not have seen the showinit's entirety WILL still come here. It's absolutely fine to point out who is dead or not, but it's not cool to do that on the front page. There is no notice for anyone visiting this site via Google (or anything else) that they are about to walk into MASSIVE spoilers on the FRONT page of this website. It's just... rather tactless and rude and an awful, terrible idea to include these details on the single most important and central and central page of the wiki. Especially in a show where the deaths are so important and surprising, a show where the deaths drive much of the most important parts of the story.

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I think"AboutGameofThrones" and "Spoilers"gotogether,inthatorder, becausethey'reexplaining"wecoverthrough the currentairedepisodes but not book spoilers".

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-- [[User:Rjcripe|rjcripe]] 08:48, April 9, 2012 (UTC)

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Ithinkitisincrediblyfoolishtobrowsea wiki about a showyouarenotup to datewith. We have details of the latest episode on the front page too. Everything on the sitehasplotdetailssothere isnoway to keepthefrontpagefreeofplotdetails.Wedon'tconsidercharacterdeathsspoilersiftheepisode they occurredinhasaired already.--[[User:Opark 77|Opark 77]] 09:05, April 9,2012(UTC)

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Nowontheonehand,thisiskindof a disclaimer,meaningitdoesn'tneed to beup top....but on the otherhand,don'twewantrandomnewvisitors to seeit?Orwouldtheybotherreadingitatall,insteadofjustchargingintowhat they cametoreadaboutJonSnow?

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Ijust started watching the show,and I came to the Wiki to find information about the map and familytrees and stuff. Iknowhowtoavoid spoilers, but seriously? Putting the deadcharactersontheverytopof the veryfrontpage of the entiresite?That'snotjustfoolish,but it'spointless.I think you're mad if you expect no one to get spoiled from that. Whose browsing experience will really be enhancedbyshowing it? - [[Special:Contributions/159.91.118.126|159.91.118.126]]16:06,April 16, 2012 (UTC)

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Asfor the "LiveNewsFeed" and "RecentChanges"...somewouldsaythey'renotnecessary, but the right-handcolumnissomuch''shorter''than the mainleftcolumn(the pollsticksoutatthebottom)that it actuallyneeds to be longer,notshorter.

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''Exactly'' my point. I mean, seriously... anyone who has watched the showinit's entirety ''already'' knows who is dead and who is alive (therefore explicitly indicating who has died on the frontpage is a futile effort) and anyone who hasn't will have nearly all the most suspenseful and eventful scenes spoiled for them ''just'' by visiting the ''front'' page.Again, nooneissayingremoveallspoilers from the wiki, all people want is to have the spoilersremoved from the ''front'' page. I know I, for one, do visit wikis for shows I have not finished for basic, background info. I don't read very far into the websites, but to pretend that the only people who visit wikis are those who have watched the show in it's entirety is completely ignorant. Just bury the info skin deep... just past the front page (and maybe opening paragraphs and section headers of pages, although that is debatable and I personally don't care if they contain spoilers). But I think what I'm all saying here is really besides the point now. Since it has (apparently) been decided to only include ''living''characters in the front page's character portal, this discussion is essentially pointless (btw, excellent call whoever decided that--it's really the best compromise and perhaps the only one that will actually satisfy both parties and stances on this issue).

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Andthenthere's the contributinginfotab, whichkindofmakesmoresensenext to the otherdisclaimers...

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EDIT: Oh, and the whole thing about the spoiler policy--no where in that policy is anything stated that the front page is an O.K. and appropriate space for spoilers. So pointing to that as a qualifier for front page spoilers doesn't quite work...

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-- [[User:Rjcripe|rjcripe]] 03:01, April 24, 2012 (UTC)

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:::....youbuffoon.Thiswikiiswritten from the standpoint that readerswillhavewatched the most recent episode. EVERY TV wiki functions this way.You'reopenlyaskingustowhat?Catertopeoplewhodidn'tevenwatch the ''last'' seasonyet?Why would weevenhave information on episode 2, "the Kingsroad", when that might spoil it for the people who only watched episode 1?! I mean seriously, sit down andask yourself, functionally, how the hell would you ever institute such a policy? You're asking for family trees to be a snapshot of what they were in Season 1?

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...okay,screwit,weneedthings that catchpeople'seyeon the topcomputer-screen'sworthofmaterial,andnewsworksbetteratthat.Anyonereading the frontpagecarefully would readallof it, scrolling down toread the disclaimers.

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:::Yikes..."topretend that the only people who visit wikis are those who have watched the show in its entirety"....that's the CENTRAL ASSUMPTION of this wiki! This is a wiki devotedSPECIFICALLY to the TV show, not even the books. This show is slated to run about eight seasons. Take "The Wire" for example, that ran five seasons...are you honestly saying that a wiki devoted to "TheWire" should,evenduring season 4, haveastrictspoilers policy that considers ANYTHING beyond season 1 to be a spoiler?

We ''might'' beabletoeven out the two sides a bit more if I could somehow add more than 5 entries each to News and Recent Changes -- though the current poll is also unusually long, later polls shouldn'tbemorethan,Idon'tknow,3-5options, that isn't asbad. We'll play around with the ''proportions'', but moving them anywhere else is inadvisable. --[[User:The Dragon Demands|The Dragon Demands]] ([[User talk:The Dragon Demands|talk]]) 21:15, April 12, 2015 (UTC)

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:::Onceagain,DragonDemands,you'reinsultingpeopleandbeingruderightoffthebat.Howisitthattheother Admins cangettheirpointsacrosswithoutinsultingpeople,yetyoucan'tseemtodoit?IhaveneverseenanAdmintalk to people the wayyoudo. Ever. Admins aresupposedtosetthebarandleadby example. You were rude before you became an Admin, butyou haven't changed at all. I'm probably going to get banned for speaking out against you, butI can't sit back anymore. It's ridiculous.

::::ActuallyI'minsultingthis guy because I'm already on the verge of banning him for the way he insulted [[User:Greater good]] over on his talk page; out of context this may seem harsh but there have been ongoing problems with this guy. Yes, my overall command style is to serve the "greater good" by being willing to just plain throw out the few bad apples. I know my methods are harsh, [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceqNcCUUakE but I get results, damn it!] (why would you be in danger of banning? You're a regular contributor and follow the rules).--[[User:The Dragon Demands|The Dragon Demands]] ([[User talk:The Dragon Demands|talk]]) 15:33, April 24, 2013 (UTC)

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==Characternavboxupdate==

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We've explanded from a four by four grid of 16 characters in the front page to 20, but now it's agreed to expand it to a five by five grid of 25 (anything wider wouldn't display properly).

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::::Areyoureferringto his comment on the "Prose" section of GreaterGood's talk page? If so, I don't see how that's rude, he's calmly and clearly explaining his point of view. In fact, it's a lot more polite than how youusuallyrespond to people.

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Sowehavefivenewslots to fill.

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::::​And once again, the other Admins get the job done while being polite and without insulting people. You like using that McGarnigle reference, except you're not a cop fighting crime. You're an Admin on a Wikia site. Your methods don't have to be harsh to get the job done. [[User:Draevan13|<font face="" color="#000000">'''DRAEVAN13'''</font>]][[File:Targaryen.JPG|26px|link=User talk:Draevan13]] 17:06, April 24, 2013 (UTC)

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==HouseGreyjoy in the slider==

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Thebasicidea for these is that they're "viewpoint characters" who "carry" major portions of the storyline. In the novels they'd be POV characters, and often they are the same people, such as Arya Stark. A few storylines in the TV series are now shown from their own POV, i.e. the Tyrells.

TheotherthingtokeepinmindiswhatIcalltheredundancyprinciple:iftwomaincast members are alwaystogether, their storylines overlap -- with alimitednumberofslots and a greatneedtoprioritize,thosethatoverlaparen'tas vital. Example: wenever see Rickon or Hodor without Bran, so Bran would stand for all of them (though even then those two aren't big enough, the scenes are structured around Bran). Thus one person who "carries" a storyline not seen by any other character might merit their own slot, i.e. when the camera spends a lot of time with Ygritte that doesn't involve Jon Snow during Season 4.

*Top row: "House Stark and close allies, who appear in Season 5" - Jon Snow, Samwell Tarly, Arya, Sansa, and Brienne of Tarth. Bran isn't in Season 5 so he's not in this.

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* Second row: "House Lannister" - Tywin and Joffrey are out, Cersei's younger two children are stepping up in the story, so it's: Cersei, Jaime, Tyrion, Tommen, Myrcella. Tommen might overlap a bit but he's important because he's the king, and Myrcella will have a bigger role in Season 5 which several subplots revolve around.

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*Third row: Stannis, Margaery, Littlefinger, Varys, Daenerys - each carries their own subplot, or represents a distinct faction (in fact, both, for all of them). A problem with Daenerys's storyline is that really, ''almost all'' of the characters she interacts with technically don't pass the "redundancy" test - we hardly ever saw her supporting cast when they weren't with her - though at least that was starting to change in Season 4. Anyway, no denying that these five on this row are worth inclusion.

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*Fourth row: Roose, Ramsay, Reek, Doran, the Sand Snakes - Roose and Ramsay are major villains, Reek is a viewpoint character of sorts (plus the only ironborn on here, given how much their subplots have been ignored since Season 2). Meanwhile, Doran the head of House Martell is the big new cast member in Season 5. The Sand Snakes were great because, apart from being important new characters, they have a group name, so they're a three-for-one: one box for three characters.

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So who should be in the fifth row:

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...thinking on it, Olenna and Loras, as they're fairly important this season and major characters people would be looking for.

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I wouldn't put Ellaria or Trystane in because they're redundant with Doran or the Sand Snakes.

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...we put Melisandre in because she's big this season and not always just doing stuff with Stannis in every scene. Davos, for the moment, seems to just be in every scene with Stannis, so unfortunately while important, he overlaps (in the novels, Stannis isn't a POV narrator, all of his scenes are told from Davos's POV narration). Again, the idea being that people randomly browsing who have no idea how to navigate the wiki beyond what they click on the front page would be able to use this character as an "access point": read the Stannis article, click on links in ''his'' article, branching out to all other articles in his storyline that he touches.

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We'll put Tormund in because now that Ygritte is dead we need a wildling viewpoint, and he seems to be fairly prominent this season.

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Lastly...there were not obvious choices beyond that (other than using Davos, who again I think is redundant)....so I decided, why not use Shireen? Apart from people liking her, reports say that Shireen is more prominent this season (understandably so; she's not just locked away in Dragonstone anymore, but interacting with everyone at Castle Black).

Oh...thank you for the photos. Well if enough other people want Ellaria instead of Olenna, fine (by which I mean Gonzalo84 and QueenBuffy wanted it, so that votes me down two to one). The one thing though is you mixed up the photos to try to space them out, but I was trying to group them together (more or less) by faction/relation (not to say I was entirely successful). I'll take another stab at reshuffling them...--[[User:The Dragon Demands|The Dragon Demands]] ([[User talk:The Dragon Demands|talk]]) 20:05, April 19, 2015 (UTC)

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===Revisions following the mid-point of Season 5===

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Well episode 5 of 10 just aired, and I've been asked for some revisions to the character boxes:

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Keeping to the "redundancy principle"...Tormund only really appears on-screen with Jon, and there are other more diverse subplots which could be better suited by other characters.

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Conversely, Bronn was always with Tyrion then with Jaime, but he's such a well-developed and interesting character in his own right - increasing in importance now that he's joining the minor nobility - that I think a lot of people would be looking for him.

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We didn't want to give away that Jorah would return back in the early episodes, but now he is being focused on quite a bit.

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Barristan is out and Daario etc. only really appear in context of Daenerys, but Missandei has appeared prominently enough ''and in storylines separate from Daenerys'' to make her worth listing (for more than ''one'' person in the Daenerys storyline).

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So Davos and Melisandre overlapped too much with Stannis - and it turns out that Melisandre will be going WITH Stannis instead of staying at the Wall with her own storyline. I do think Shireen merits her own slot given how much more focus she's had in the first half of Season 5.

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So we'd switch out Melisandre for Jorah, and I think Ellaria Sand for Missandei -- Ellaria is too redundant with "Sand Snakes" story-wise.

It's just a Google News list of sorts of the top "trending" news, not ''actual'' news.

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And the ''mainstream media'' attempts to discuss the series have earned my disgust and contempt.

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Do we really need to know what Buzzfeed has to say in its review? Reviews are not ''news''. Even insightful reviews from major and reputable sources such as io9.com or AintItCool.com, Entertainment Weekly or the New York Times. They have to go.

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Then we have the problem that ''larger'' news sites like Entertainment Weekly often repeat ''badly sourced rumors'' as fact, causing a sensation, which ends up in our news feed.

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For example, last November the news was very slow, so when the mainstream news heard that Charles Dance was returning in Season 5 to "play" Tywin, they exploded in speculation that he was coming back from the dead...

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...when any idiot who read the books could have easily squashed that rumor by pointing out "his funeral is a major scene at the beginning of the next novel, he'll probably be playing his corpse".

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I mean, even TV-only viewers - the attentive ones - mostly must have assumed "he's coming back to play his corpse"....I mean, outside chance some TV-viewers might have pondered "will be be back for flashbacks?" -- but so do book-readers....and, as we've seen, the show hates using flashbacks, so unlikely.

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But seriously; they jumped onto "Tywin will come back as a wight" or something, and this went on for ''weeks'' - god-damned ''weeks'' - rather than bothering to fact-check the obvious?

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I half-think they knew, but without any other "news", just needed something to sensationalize.

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Well, '''It's time to put them on a shorter leash.'''

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On top of this...a ''lot'' of "news" just reports on what the actors are doing...things that have utterly nothing to do with the TV show.

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Paraphrasing Jaime's famous line from the novel, when Meryn says he did what Joffrey told him without question, because he can't just "decide" what orders to follow immediately and what others he should ask a superior to double-check (the blind thinking that got Ned executed), Jaime says in frustration: "If Tommen asks you to saddle his horse, you should ''probably'' do that without hesitation. If he tells you to ''kill'' his horse, you should ''probably'' confirm it with me first." Ugh.

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Thus "Emilia Clarke cast as the new Sarah Connor in huge Terminator franchise film" -- is probably news. "Emilia Clarke does cover shoot with ''Esquire'' that has no new information about Game of Thrones"...is NOT "news".

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Wait...ack, the news is actually an RSS feed; I never use those.

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'''My new solution is to delete the auto-generated news ticker, and just have the Administrators update it by hand.'''

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Some simple guidelines for what is "not news", and should appear on the front page:

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*Reviews that pop up in Google Search are not "news".

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*Unless they said something ''significant'' about the TV show, not just "yeah it's great working on it, and my character has a dark season ahead", actor interviews or photo shoots with magazines are not "news" either. Conversely, a 5 page long magazine interview in which Lena Headey discusses her entire acting career ''might'' be news, but a two paragraph red carpet interview is ''probably'' not. Only if it's significant or substantive. This extends beyond magazines to media appearances: if Lena Headey makes a guest appearance on Seth Meyers or Jimmy Kimmel and ''verbally'' gives an interview, the same rules apply: if it was in-depth and contained ''significant'' information, it is "news". It can even be "significant" if she makes a ''very'' unique joke - i.e. "Lena pretends to be drunken Cersei doing improv insults" -- ''might'' be newsworth.

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*Above all, such print or video interviews, with no significantly new information but with fun bits from the actors, aren't "prioritized" but not necessarily excluded: if it's a slow news day in August, yes, we'd probably run that news. During the middle of an actively airing TV season? Other things would probably come up which take priority given the limited number of spots on the front page.

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*References in popular culture to Game of Thrones are not "news" unless they are particularly significant: "local politician cracks a Game of Thornes joke" probably isn't news, "South Park does a Game of Thrones episode" probably ''is'' news.

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*Most statements made by George R.R. Martin or staff writers on the TV series are ''usually'' news (Benioff, Weiss, Cogman, Hill, Taylor). Even then, sometimes they're just appearing at a red carpet and repeating a generic line about the show, but not saying anything "significantly new" - which is what would make it "news" - ''information'' that does not appear elsewhere.

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**Similarly, major interviews with the design team or production crew are at times important enough to put on the front page, i.e. "massive 5 page interview with David Peterson about creating Valyrian" or "massive 5 page interview with Michele Clapton about costume design".

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*Anything stupid enough to post a spoiler that we wouldn't post here isn't news we'd want to link to -- particularly some that even put the spoilers IN THEIR HEADLINES. Dear god, I've seen headlines on the auto-generated RSS feeds that...are the equivalent of saying "Robb Stark dies this week!" ''before'' the Red Wedding actually aired. Because it's based on ''viewcount'' popularity, not any screening. That was another reason for gutting this out of the wiki, to avoid spoilers ''posted in headlines''.

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For example, this "Life Lessons We Learned from Game of Thrones" by ''People'' magazine appeared in our front page news ticker today: http://www.people.com/article/game-of-thrones-life-lessons

*Westeros.org - home of the ''A Wiki of Ice and Fire'' that we interlink with, Martin's go-to fansite, run by Elio and Linda who serve as fact checkers for Martin and co-wrote ''A World of Ice and Fire'' with him. They focus more on in-depth books to TV comparisons, slow but very measured responses to "news".

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*WatchersOnTheWall.com - biggest and most reliable news site for day-by-day news. They do ''half the work for us'' of filtering out the "actual news" from the "not real news".

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*For both Westeros.org and WatchersonTheWall.com, also rely on them as news aggregators. That is, sometimes they have "original news" based on spy reports they get from the set. Other times, they might just repost a link to a long interview Martin did with Vulture.com -- ''in which case'', you don't need to link to WatchersOnTheWall.com directly, but post the direct link to the ''actual'' article they're talking about.

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*A few other sites have reliable news - I've noticed ''Den Of Geek'' for example - and also a ''few'' others such as AintItCool.com, io9.com, TheMarySue.com, etc. -- though usually anything they'd post on Westeros.org or WOTW.com got too first.

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Between the two of them, Westeros.org and WatchersOnTheWall.com aggregate most news we'd need - as would their forums and comments sections. These are the main hubs. Otherwise we shouldn't really be wasting that much time ''searching'' for news, just reposting links to news they already reported on which seems "informationally significant".

They come in rows of five, and I think it obvious to include the 13 major "Great Houses" - 7 Kingdoms plus the Riverlands and Crownlands, then the Boltons and Freys usurping in the North and Riverlands (for eleven), and then two sub-branches of House Baratheon, yields 13. What I was doing up to now was listing Karstark and Florent: Karstark because they were important at the time in Season 3, and Florent because - while not mentioned prominently - they are the main rivals to the Tyrells in the Reach and claim they have more right to Highgarden (plus Selyse is a Florent, they remain one of Stannis's few main supporters, and Shireen and Samwell are half-Florent). It kind of gave the Florents "near-Great House" status. I needed to fill out the row.

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Anyway I just added another row. The selection process was based on "who is important as a faction in the TV show", which is very simplified from the novels. By this criterion, "House Tarth" and "House Baelish" don't really count: House Tarth ''as a political entity'' has not appeared, only the individual Brienne of Tarth - who is already represented in the character boxes anyway. Littlefinger, meanwhile, is the ''only'' living member of House Baelish, and he acts much more as an individual than as a member of "a House", with his own retinue and servants from the Fingers. Again, redundant with him being in the character boxes.

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So the five extra ones I picked for now are: Mormont, Umber, Reed, Stokeworth, Forrester. I put "Forrester" in there to throw a bone to the video game stuff. Umber and Mormont...haven't been mentioned as prominently ''recently'', they're not as big as they were in the novels, but still of some importance to the Northern storyline. The novels focus more on the North's vassal Houses - in contrast, the TV viewers don't really need to instantly know who the Marbrands and Leffords are in the Westerlands. House Reed...while not appearing as a political faction, last two years we had two characters from it, and they...''allude'' to their presence harassing the ironborn at Moat Cailin.

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Stokeworth I put in given their introduction in Season 5.

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IF the Manderlys were included in Season 5 I'd have put them in, given how important they are in the novels at this point.

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Other options were Clegane, Tarly, Redwyne, Blackwood, Bracken, Mallister....but they haven't really been as active as political factions that ''casual'' viewers would need to know about. They've been mentioned in passing (again, Samwell isn't really representative of the Tarlys as a political faction, Olenna is in it but she's really more a Tyrell). Clegane as a faction isn't that important as they're just a knightly House, though top servants of the Lannisters - and with both Gregor and Sandor out of commission, it didn't seem worth it. I didn't include Blackfyre because they've never been mentioned in the live-action episodes, only the animated featurettes.

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Otherwise, I don't think there are any other major vassal Houses that would merit being on the front page, unless some other ones start getting mentioned more prominently.

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So now we've got 20 Houses in there, 13 are locked in, and we might rearrange the other 7 depending on what focus the rest of Season 5 has.--[[User:The Dragon Demands|The Dragon Demands]] ([[User talk:The Dragon Demands|talk]]) 16:30, April 19, 2015 (UTC)

*WinterIsComing.net became one of the premiere fansites for daily news updates and in-depth analysis of the TV series, next to Westeros.org (which has ties with the author himself, and is more based on the books and predates the TV series, and focuses more on in-depth analysis).

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*The owner of WiC.net retired a few months before Season 4 began due to personal life reasons. He sold the site to sports news aggregator/website collective FanSided.com.

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*FanSided proceeded to run WiC.net into the ground, and horribly abused the ''entire'' original writing staff - who were all ''volunteers'' who worked ''for free'', and never signed ''any'' contracts.

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*The original fansite wasn't "for profit", but Fansided wanted to turn a profit on it. So they set unrealistically high, astronomically high production quotas.

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*Fansided...bizarrely, really only wanted to buy the ''brand name'' "WinterIsComing.net", and treated the original writing staff (8-10 people, four core writers plus commentators) as unwanted baggage. Nor did they seemingly know how to make a "Game of Thrones News Site" at all.

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**They went so far as to...try to turn the site into a poorly made ripoff of the success of the "Talking Dead" franchise for "The Walking Dead". The original staff were Game of Thrones experts through years of working on this, but Fansided...hired D-list local actors with no particular insight to host a poor copy of "The Talking Dead", which they called "The WiC.net Live Show" (airing "Live" after each episode). They didn't even ''tell'' the original writing staff they were going to do this until a week before the Season 4 premiere.

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**As insider reports from the writing staff later said...Fansided genuinely ran a truck off a cliff, and never paused to measure how much "content" they could plausibly produce relative to the astronomically high quotas they had set. Basically, they had...apparently assumed that their Live Show would be a runaway success on the scale of The Talking Dead...granted this ''TV show'' is as big, but they're not a cable TV channel! They don't have enough publicity to grow into something that big, that fast...even if they had ''great'' commentators, and not just average viewers who appeared on it for a pay check. Now you'd think they'd at least...wait a few weeks to see how it did, if the numbers grew. But apparently the numbers were ''so'' bad that by around ''the second episode'' of Season 4, they were outright horrified. How high did they assume the ratings would be, and how low did they have to really be in comparison, to justify being shocked by ''two weeks'' into it? Pretty low.

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**Not pulling enough revenue in to justify the expense of even making the Live Show, they started frantically producing other "filler" content to meet their website viewcount quotas. To stress: they never ''planned'' to do this, the writers who later quit stated that in a blind panic, the Fansided team started frantically producing fluff filler articles. One of these was the "Weapons of Westeros" video series...which was actually ''ripping off'' wiki articles (by the end, they were near-verbatim copies). **By the end, they resorted to making stories on "Tyrion flavored martinis, the Tiny Tyroni!" -- what does that ''even mean'', a Tyrion "inspired" drink? Nor were they "reporting" on these drinks...they had the Live Show staff try to come up with alcoholic drink mixing tips. I mean they were just...''total nonsequitors''.

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*The original writing staff was being forced to prioritize the Live Show over their ''own'' written recaps and reviews of the episodes! That is, to police the comments sections, wasting time they needed to write their own material. It's...it's as if they were squatters on their own website. There was ''no'' communication between the two groups: the original writing staff, and the FanSided video team, who kept posting filler material because they had terrible ratings...''to the point that they were copying from Game of Thrones Wiki''.

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*The drinks videos were a real breaking point, the "Tiny Tyrioni" in particular was seen as Ableist and mocking Tyrion's disability...and when the original writing staffers complained they got yelled at. It was obvious they were no longer masters in their own house. Fansided had bought a major fansite, promptly sidelined the skilled writing staff they ''paid money'' to "buy", then hired D-list actors who just happened to watch the show, and ''assume'' that they could replace the original staff's writing quality?

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*So a few months after Season 4 ended, in August the ''entire writing staff'' of WinterIsComing.net - who had been working there ''since Season 1'' - quit ''en masse'' and set up a new fansite, WatchersOnTheWall.com -- which is basically the OLD WiC.net ''in all but name''. Direct comparisons were drawn to the Simpsons episode when the Stonecutters reform into the "No Homers Club". NO ONE remained behind.

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**Fansided stupidly abused a writing staff who had ''built'' that fansite...who were working ''for free'', with ''no contract''...and also never bothered to make them sign non-compete clauses in any contract. Normally a non-compete clause says that you can't quit and form a rival website. Had they ''bothered'' to invest ''any'' attention in the original, skilled writing staff, they wouldn't have made such a boneheaded and obvious oversight.

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**It stupidly never occurred to Fansided that ''all'' of the on-location reporters, set spies, and local sources in Northern Ireland and Croatia...were contacts ''the original writing staff'' personally developed and maintained, who had ''no loyalty or legal obligation'' to Fansided. When the original writing staff left, they took all of their unique local sources and contacts with them. Fansided truly never realized how precious the original writing staff was before alienating them by prioritizing their own crappy "Live Show" attempt - and by "crappy" I mean what Fansided admitted privately: it wasn't pulling in nearly enough ratings to sustain itself financially.

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**For the next couple of months through Christmas, "FanSided's WinterIsComing.net" (as we now call it to distinguish it from the original writing staff's previous work)...has gone through a revolving door of staffers and head editors-in-chief. Things have been a bit more stable since new years but...they're just a news aggregator now, repeating stuff other news sites like Entertainment Weekly or People.

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HBO's publicity department also considers WatchersOnTheWall.com significant enough to give them advanced screener copies of episodes. The TV writers like Cogman ''know'' the writers on WatchersONTheWall.com.

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Therefore, given that:

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*WatchersOnTheWall.com ''actually is'' the "WiC.net team" from the first four years of the TV show.

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*"Fansided's WinterIsComing.net" are morons, who have no idea how to run a news site and have no particularly insightful Game of Thrones commentary to make, and are now mostly just repeating other news sources anyway (to the point that their new hires have absent-mindedly reported on and linked to exclusive reports ''at WatchersOnTheWall.com itself'').

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*Fansided's WinterIsComing.net has extensively plagiarized Game of Thrones Wiki material, infringing on the copyrights of our intellectual property, and made no attempt to either A - remove the content or B - at least put a disclaimer on it crediting the wiki

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'''Fansided's WinterIscoming.net is blacklisted as a news source.''' We self-consciously hope that they will shut down entirely, as more and more readers realize that all of the original writers that built that original site simply rebranded as "WatchersOnTheWall.com". They are not welcome here or ''anywhere'' anymore. The internet chatter for the past year (on Westeros.org, reddit, etc.) is how Fansided is just a naked corporate grab at buying something they have no idea how to run. This isn't just "tense silence around them" - they are ''pariahs'' online and in fandom now. Hopefully soon they'll be just a memory.

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So never link to them as a news source, or cite them in any article. If you see something they've linked to, just post the source (if you happen to see a WiC.net post linking to a Vogue article...why not just directly use the Vogue article?)...and it's unlikely they'll ever get exclusives again, the cast members gravitated to giving interviews with the original writers at WOTW.com (who they ''already knew'', through four years of building up contacts!). In the unlikely even that they present some entirely new information, bring it to the attention of an Administrator here via our Talk pages so we can decide what to do.

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Otherwise, continue further discussion on this matter at the forum link I posted above. I only made this repost here because I just archived the past several years worth of Talk page discussions on this Talk page for the wiki's Front Page, and I wanted to make sure casual users (who often check here first) would see it.--[[User:The Dragon Demands|The Dragon Demands]] ([[User talk:The Dragon Demands|talk]]) 22:57, April 12, 2015 (UTC)

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Dear Lord, the "revolving door of Editors-in-Chief" continues over at WIC: it turns out that that Rowan Kaiser guy himself stopped working there after around the third episode of Season 5. So how many is that since the original writing staff left? I think Kaiser was the third one? And the other two were in the ''off'' season given that the break with the old writers happened after the Season 4 finale? Yikes, three episodes in and the Editor in Chief leaves? This stuff is comedy gold. I've also noticed that the specific commentator who was doing those "Weapons of Westeros" videos ripping off our wiki mysteriously did not return for this season, haha.--[[User:The Dragon Demands|The Dragon Demands]] ([[User talk:The Dragon Demands|talk]]) 00:41, June 10, 2015 (UTC)

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==Front page poll==

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I wish you hadn't changed the poll. It was more relevant since we finally just got to see the premiere after almost a year. {{Template:Buffymybasset/sig}} 16:35, April 13, 2015 (UTC)

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Ack...you're right, I hadn't thought of this...in the off-season there was so little activity that the poll didn't seem that big, but now we might end up disagreeing on what to make as a new poll. Our traffic is higher in the on-season and we have more to discuss.

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Well, the poll I took down was "how would you rate the most recent episode: Good, Bad, or Average?" -- Generally I think that most people who are reading a GOT wiki like the show, and those kinds of polls are kind of bland, compared to a specific question about the most recent episode, such as "Was Robb Stark right to execute Rickard Stark"? etc.

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So I figured for the first episode of Season 5, given how unprecedented it is to have a flashback, why not ask, "what do you think of them using flashbacks? Was it too confusing or do you want more?"

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...Every Sunday night in Season 5 we would probably need to discuss on the Talk page here what the next poll should be, before we change it. Yeah, I didn't think this through I was just jumping to get it changed.--[[User:The Dragon Demands|The Dragon Demands]] ([[User talk:The Dragon Demands|talk]]) 21:47, April 13, 2015 (UTC)

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I think the episode 2 poll should be "Who would you have voted for in the Night's Watch election?

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*[[Alliser Thorne]]

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*[[Denys Mallister]]

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*Write-in candidate

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Maybe. I mean originally I thought the election would last more than one episode, leaving us on a cliffhanger.

I don't know if Jon declines Stannis' offer in this episode, but if not, it could be "Should Jon accept Stannis's offer about the thing it is about." Or something like "What were your first thoughts about Dorne and Prince Doran?" But I like yours, we should use it. I don't think we need a third option for that, unless the show has more candidates. --[[User:-Gladiatus-|Gladiatus]] ([[User talk:-Gladiatus-|talk]]) 16:58, April 19, 2015 (UTC)

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Unfortunately, spoilers reveal that whatever happens, it's not a cliffhanger left over for the next episode.

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Er...what about "Should Daenerys show mercy to the insurgents in Meereen?"

Yeah, just saw the episode. I think the question about Dany and mercy would be good, or the one "who would you have voted for in the Night's Watch election." --[[User:-Gladiatus-|Gladiatus]] ([[User talk:-Gladiatus-|talk]]) 13:28, April 20, 2015 (UTC)

"Sansa marrying Ramsay is an invention of the TV series, in the novels she never even meets the Boltons, but remains in the Vale and out of the main plotlines. Do you think:

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*If they couldn't do Sansa's storyline from the books, they should have just had her not appear in Season 5 at all, the way they did with her brother Bran.

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*It was better to condense Sansa with the Bolton subplot so she actually gets important stuff to do in Season 5 - even if Sansa is being terrorized by Ramsay

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*It was better to condense Sansa with the Bolton subplot so she actually gets important stuff to do in Season 5 - and I suspect that Sansa is only ''pretending'' to be frightened by Ramsay, to lull him into a false sense of security.

As those of you returning may have noticed, the Admins got together with the Wikia staff a few months back to make a new Wiki-Skin for Season 5 - the skin should have been updated for Season 4 but was not, meaning that we got stuck for two years with those stupid character-head posters...with their dead fish-eyes staring out at us (they weren't good posters, why did we make them the wiki-skin?)

At any rate, for the first time since the beginning of Season 3, we have a new Wiki-skin (I also rebuilt the top navigation bar some months ago).

Up until a few weeks ago we were busy so unfortunately the templates were still grey-blue for white text, but now we have black text, making them illegible - I finally got around to fixing that though, it should be fine now.

However, I wonder if there are any minor tweaks we need to make to it, given that it doesn't display with the same proportions on every computer screen.

We may need to post screenshots of this. What does the wiki-skin look like to everyone else?

On my current computer it is decent...but the last half an inch or so of the wallpaper sidebars is just black, under the map images.

I've seen other computers (at work, library) which are square - unlike my laptop - and don't display it well at all.

So how is the wiki-skin showing up for everyone?

We need to make sure it displays properly and is fitted well with the sides, flush with the sides. Not sure how to do that but we might need to flag down the Wikia Tech team to help us make minor refinements to that.--The Dragon Demands (talk) 21:20, April 12, 2015 (UTC)

The front page consists of a main section on the left, and a sidebar on the right.

Currently, going down in the main left column, we have:

Front page slider

Welcome to Game of Thrones Wiki message

Side-by-side first and last episode links

Obviously these stay where they are.

Then we have a series of collapsable navigation templates I made. Those take up some space but they greatly aid navigation and make it spiffy (actual content in the boxes, such as characters, is a separate matter).

Below that we have two large sections that didn't fit earlier, but which aren't near the top. Random visitors to the front page who scroll down an inch or two will see the top of the blue navboxes and scroll down some more, but these are down there.

First, we've got slots for two featured videos - use a lot of space, but generally important to have.

Then we have a Poll (going to make a new one after the premiere) which takes up a lot of space, but is at the bottom of the page so anyone going down that far would be taking the time to read it -- I mean what's the other option? Make the poll "more visible" by putting it at the top? Displacing "most recent episode?" Silly.

In the right hand column we have:

An advertisement video square we cannot control, next to the slider (roughly)

Featured article (currently the Sand Snakes) - Good.

Then we have:

About Game of Thrones

Spoiler Policy

Latest News

Recent edits

Contributing info

The right hand column only extends to the bottom of the video section, the poll is below that (and thus uneven).

We can't just make the poll wider (even if we could, with coding) because it's not as if the text is wrapped around multiple lines - that's just how much space one line questions take).

It makes sense to put the "Contributing" disclaimer stuff at the bottom, good.

I think "About Game of Thrones" and "Spoilers" go together, in that order, because they're explaining "we cover through the current aired episodes but not book spoilers".

Now on the one hand, this is kind of a disclaimer, meaning it doesn't need to be up top....but on the other hand, don't we want random new visitors to see it? Or would they bother reading it at all, instead of just charging into what they came to read about Jon Snow?

As for the "Live NewsFeed" and "Recent Changes"...some would say they're not necessary, but the right-hand column is so much shorter than the main left column (the poll sticks out at the bottom) that it actually needs to be longer, not shorter.

And then there's the contributing info tab, which kind of makes more sense next to the other disclaimers...

...okay, screw it, we need things that catch people's eye on the top computer-screen's worth of material, and news works better at that. Anyone reading the front page carefully would read all of it, scrolling down to read the disclaimers.

Therefore I'm going to put "News" and "Recent Changes" at the top, but under "Featured Article".

We might be able to even out the two sides a bit more if I could somehow add more than 5 entries each to News and Recent Changes -- though the current poll is also unusually long, later polls shouldn't be more than, I don't know, 3-5 options, that isn't as bad. We'll play around with the proportions, but moving them anywhere else is inadvisable. --The Dragon Demands (talk) 21:15, April 12, 2015 (UTC)

Btw I've finally replaced those long outdated front page navigation images - which were in a weird italicized font of uncertain origin - which new images which actually use a "Game of Thrones" style font. This should match up with the other navigation tables.--The Dragon Demands (talk) 00:32, April 26, 2015 (UTC)

We've explanded from a four by four grid of 16 characters in the front page to 20, but now it's agreed to expand it to a five by five grid of 25 (anything wider wouldn't display properly).

So we have five new slots to fill.

The basic idea for these is that they're "viewpoint characters" who "carry" major portions of the storyline. In the novels they'd be POV characters, and often they are the same people, such as Arya Stark. A few storylines in the TV series are now shown from their own POV, i.e. the Tyrells.

The other thing to keep in mind is what I call the redundancy principle: if two main cast members are always together, their storylines overlap -- with a limited number of slots and a great need to prioritize, those that overlap aren't as vital. Example: we never see Rickon or Hodor without Bran, so Bran would stand for all of them (though even then those two aren't big enough, the scenes are structured around Bran). Thus one person who "carries" a storyline not seen by any other character might merit their own slot, i.e. when the camera spends a lot of time with Ygritte that doesn't involve Jon Snow during Season 4.

Most of these are kind of obvious, though. So right now, we've got:

Top row: "House Stark and close allies, who appear in Season 5" - Jon Snow, Samwell Tarly, Arya, Sansa, and Brienne of Tarth. Bran isn't in Season 5 so he's not in this.

Second row: "House Lannister" - Tywin and Joffrey are out, Cersei's younger two children are stepping up in the story, so it's: Cersei, Jaime, Tyrion, Tommen, Myrcella. Tommen might overlap a bit but he's important because he's the king, and Myrcella will have a bigger role in Season 5 which several subplots revolve around.

Third row: Stannis, Margaery, Littlefinger, Varys, Daenerys - each carries their own subplot, or represents a distinct faction (in fact, both, for all of them). A problem with Daenerys's storyline is that really, almost all of the characters she interacts with technically don't pass the "redundancy" test - we hardly ever saw her supporting cast when they weren't with her - though at least that was starting to change in Season 4. Anyway, no denying that these five on this row are worth inclusion.

Fourth row: Roose, Ramsay, Reek, Doran, the Sand Snakes - Roose and Ramsay are major villains, Reek is a viewpoint character of sorts (plus the only ironborn on here, given how much their subplots have been ignored since Season 2). Meanwhile, Doran the head of House Martell is the big new cast member in Season 5. The Sand Snakes were great because, apart from being important new characters, they have a group name, so they're a three-for-one: one box for three characters.

So who should be in the fifth row:

...thinking on it, Olenna and Loras, as they're fairly important this season and major characters people would be looking for.

I wouldn't put Ellaria or Trystane in because they're redundant with Doran or the Sand Snakes.

...we put Melisandre in because she's big this season and not always just doing stuff with Stannis in every scene. Davos, for the moment, seems to just be in every scene with Stannis, so unfortunately while important, he overlaps (in the novels, Stannis isn't a POV narrator, all of his scenes are told from Davos's POV narration). Again, the idea being that people randomly browsing who have no idea how to navigate the wiki beyond what they click on the front page would be able to use this character as an "access point": read the Stannis article, click on links in his article, branching out to all other articles in his storyline that he touches.

We'll put Tormund in because now that Ygritte is dead we need a wildling viewpoint, and he seems to be fairly prominent this season.

Lastly...there were not obvious choices beyond that (other than using Davos, who again I think is redundant)....so I decided, why not use Shireen? Apart from people liking her, reports say that Shireen is more prominent this season (understandably so; she's not just locked away in Dragonstone anymore, but interacting with everyone at Castle Black).
--The Dragon Demands (talk) 19:37, April 12, 2015 (UTC)

Oh...thank you for the photos. Well if enough other people want Ellaria instead of Olenna, fine (by which I mean Gonzalo84 and QueenBuffy wanted it, so that votes me down two to one). The one thing though is you mixed up the photos to try to space them out, but I was trying to group them together (more or less) by faction/relation (not to say I was entirely successful). I'll take another stab at reshuffling them...--The Dragon Demands (talk) 20:05, April 19, 2015 (UTC)

Well episode 5 of 10 just aired, and I've been asked for some revisions to the character boxes:

Keeping to the "redundancy principle"...Tormund only really appears on-screen with Jon, and there are other more diverse subplots which could be better suited by other characters.

Conversely, Bronn was always with Tyrion then with Jaime, but he's such a well-developed and interesting character in his own right - increasing in importance now that he's joining the minor nobility - that I think a lot of people would be looking for him.

We didn't want to give away that Jorah would return back in the early episodes, but now he is being focused on quite a bit.

Barristan is out and Daario etc. only really appear in context of Daenerys, but Missandei has appeared prominently enough and in storylines separate from Daenerys to make her worth listing (for more than one person in the Daenerys storyline).

So Davos and Melisandre overlapped too much with Stannis - and it turns out that Melisandre will be going WITH Stannis instead of staying at the Wall with her own storyline. I do think Shireen merits her own slot given how much more focus she's had in the first half of Season 5.

So we'd switch out Melisandre for Jorah, and I think Ellaria Sand for Missandei -- Ellaria is too redundant with "Sand Snakes" story-wise.

And while we're at it, might as well replace Tormund with Bronn. --The Dragon Demands (talk) 21:59, May 11, 2015 (UTC)

It's just a Google News list of sorts of the top "trending" news, not actual news.

And the mainstream media attempts to discuss the series have earned my disgust and contempt.

Do we really need to know what Buzzfeed has to say in its review? Reviews are not news. Even insightful reviews from major and reputable sources such as io9.com or AintItCool.com, Entertainment Weekly or the New York Times. They have to go.

Then we have the problem that larger news sites like Entertainment Weekly often repeat badly sourced rumors as fact, causing a sensation, which ends up in our news feed.

For example, last November the news was very slow, so when the mainstream news heard that Charles Dance was returning in Season 5 to "play" Tywin, they exploded in speculation that he was coming back from the dead...

...when any idiot who read the books could have easily squashed that rumor by pointing out "his funeral is a major scene at the beginning of the next novel, he'll probably be playing his corpse".

I mean, even TV-only viewers - the attentive ones - mostly must have assumed "he's coming back to play his corpse"....I mean, outside chance some TV-viewers might have pondered "will be be back for flashbacks?" -- but so do book-readers....and, as we've seen, the show hates using flashbacks, so unlikely.

But seriously; they jumped onto "Tywin will come back as a wight" or something, and this went on for weeks - god-damned weeks - rather than bothering to fact-check the obvious?

I half-think they knew, but without any other "news", just needed something to sensationalize.

Well, It's time to put them on a shorter leash.

On top of this...a lot of "news" just reports on what the actors are doing...things that have utterly nothing to do with the TV show.

Paraphrasing Jaime's famous line from the novel, when Meryn says he did what Joffrey told him without question, because he can't just "decide" what orders to follow immediately and what others he should ask a superior to double-check (the blind thinking that got Ned executed), Jaime says in frustration: "If Tommen asks you to saddle his horse, you should probably do that without hesitation. If he tells you to kill his horse, you should probably confirm it with me first." Ugh.

Thus "Emilia Clarke cast as the new Sarah Connor in huge Terminator franchise film" -- is probably news. "Emilia Clarke does cover shoot with Esquire that has no new information about Game of Thrones"...is NOT "news".

Wait...ack, the news is actually an RSS feed; I never use those.

My new solution is to delete the auto-generated news ticker, and just have the Administrators update it by hand.

Some simple guidelines for what is "not news", and should appear on the front page:

Reviews that pop up in Google Search are not "news".

Unless they said something significant about the TV show, not just "yeah it's great working on it, and my character has a dark season ahead", actor interviews or photo shoots with magazines are not "news" either. Conversely, a 5 page long magazine interview in which Lena Headey discusses her entire acting career might be news, but a two paragraph red carpet interview is probably not. Only if it's significant or substantive. This extends beyond magazines to media appearances: if Lena Headey makes a guest appearance on Seth Meyers or Jimmy Kimmel and verbally gives an interview, the same rules apply: if it was in-depth and contained significant information, it is "news". It can even be "significant" if she makes a very unique joke - i.e. "Lena pretends to be drunken Cersei doing improv insults" -- might be newsworth.

Above all, such print or video interviews, with no significantly new information but with fun bits from the actors, aren't "prioritized" but not necessarily excluded: if it's a slow news day in August, yes, we'd probably run that news. During the middle of an actively airing TV season? Other things would probably come up which take priority given the limited number of spots on the front page.

References in popular culture to Game of Thrones are not "news" unless they are particularly significant: "local politician cracks a Game of Thornes joke" probably isn't news, "South Park does a Game of Thrones episode" probably is news.

Most statements made by George R.R. Martin or staff writers on the TV series are usually news (Benioff, Weiss, Cogman, Hill, Taylor). Even then, sometimes they're just appearing at a red carpet and repeating a generic line about the show, but not saying anything "significantly new" - which is what would make it "news" - information that does not appear elsewhere.

Similarly, major interviews with the design team or production crew are at times important enough to put on the front page, i.e. "massive 5 page interview with David Peterson about creating Valyrian" or "massive 5 page interview with Michele Clapton about costume design".

Anything stupid enough to post a spoiler that we wouldn't post here isn't news we'd want to link to -- particularly some that even put the spoilers IN THEIR HEADLINES. Dear god, I've seen headlines on the auto-generated RSS feeds that...are the equivalent of saying "Robb Stark dies this week!" before the Red Wedding actually aired. Because it's based on viewcount popularity, not any screening. That was another reason for gutting this out of the wiki, to avoid spoilers posted in headlines.

Westeros.org - home of the A Wiki of Ice and Fire that we interlink with, Martin's go-to fansite, run by Elio and Linda who serve as fact checkers for Martin and co-wrote A World of Ice and Fire with him. They focus more on in-depth books to TV comparisons, slow but very measured responses to "news".

WatchersOnTheWall.com - biggest and most reliable news site for day-by-day news. They do half the work for us of filtering out the "actual news" from the "not real news".

For both Westeros.org and WatchersonTheWall.com, also rely on them as news aggregators. That is, sometimes they have "original news" based on spy reports they get from the set. Other times, they might just repost a link to a long interview Martin did with Vulture.com -- in which case, you don't need to link to WatchersOnTheWall.com directly, but post the direct link to the actual article they're talking about.

A few other sites have reliable news - I've noticed Den Of Geek for example - and also a few others such as AintItCool.com, io9.com, TheMarySue.com, etc. -- though usually anything they'd post on Westeros.org or WOTW.com got too first.

Between the two of them, Westeros.org and WatchersOnTheWall.com aggregate most news we'd need - as would their forums and comments sections. These are the main hubs. Otherwise we shouldn't really be wasting that much time searching for news, just reposting links to news they already reported on which seems "informationally significant".

They come in rows of five, and I think it obvious to include the 13 major "Great Houses" - 7 Kingdoms plus the Riverlands and Crownlands, then the Boltons and Freys usurping in the North and Riverlands (for eleven), and then two sub-branches of House Baratheon, yields 13. What I was doing up to now was listing Karstark and Florent: Karstark because they were important at the time in Season 3, and Florent because - while not mentioned prominently - they are the main rivals to the Tyrells in the Reach and claim they have more right to Highgarden (plus Selyse is a Florent, they remain one of Stannis's few main supporters, and Shireen and Samwell are half-Florent). It kind of gave the Florents "near-Great House" status. I needed to fill out the row.

Anyway I just added another row. The selection process was based on "who is important as a faction in the TV show", which is very simplified from the novels. By this criterion, "House Tarth" and "House Baelish" don't really count: House Tarth as a political entity has not appeared, only the individual Brienne of Tarth - who is already represented in the character boxes anyway. Littlefinger, meanwhile, is the only living member of House Baelish, and he acts much more as an individual than as a member of "a House", with his own retinue and servants from the Fingers. Again, redundant with him being in the character boxes.

So the five extra ones I picked for now are: Mormont, Umber, Reed, Stokeworth, Forrester. I put "Forrester" in there to throw a bone to the video game stuff. Umber and Mormont...haven't been mentioned as prominently recently, they're not as big as they were in the novels, but still of some importance to the Northern storyline. The novels focus more on the North's vassal Houses - in contrast, the TV viewers don't really need to instantly know who the Marbrands and Leffords are in the Westerlands. House Reed...while not appearing as a political faction, last two years we had two characters from it, and they...allude to their presence harassing the ironborn at Moat Cailin.

Stokeworth I put in given their introduction in Season 5.

IF the Manderlys were included in Season 5 I'd have put them in, given how important they are in the novels at this point.

Other options were Clegane, Tarly, Redwyne, Blackwood, Bracken, Mallister....but they haven't really been as active as political factions that casual viewers would need to know about. They've been mentioned in passing (again, Samwell isn't really representative of the Tarlys as a political faction, Olenna is in it but she's really more a Tyrell). Clegane as a faction isn't that important as they're just a knightly House, though top servants of the Lannisters - and with both Gregor and Sandor out of commission, it didn't seem worth it. I didn't include Blackfyre because they've never been mentioned in the live-action episodes, only the animated featurettes.

Otherwise, I don't think there are any other major vassal Houses that would merit being on the front page, unless some other ones start getting mentioned more prominently.

So now we've got 20 Houses in there, 13 are locked in, and we might rearrange the other 7 depending on what focus the rest of Season 5 has.--The Dragon Demands (talk) 16:30, April 19, 2015 (UTC)

WinterIsComing.net became one of the premiere fansites for daily news updates and in-depth analysis of the TV series, next to Westeros.org (which has ties with the author himself, and is more based on the books and predates the TV series, and focuses more on in-depth analysis).

The owner of WiC.net retired a few months before Season 4 began due to personal life reasons. He sold the site to sports news aggregator/website collective FanSided.com.

FanSided proceeded to run WiC.net into the ground, and horribly abused the entire original writing staff - who were all volunteers who worked for free, and never signed any contracts.

The original fansite wasn't "for profit", but Fansided wanted to turn a profit on it. So they set unrealistically high, astronomically high production quotas.

Fansided...bizarrely, really only wanted to buy the brand name "WinterIsComing.net", and treated the original writing staff (8-10 people, four core writers plus commentators) as unwanted baggage. Nor did they seemingly know how to make a "Game of Thrones News Site" at all.

They went so far as to...try to turn the site into a poorly made ripoff of the success of the "Talking Dead" franchise for "The Walking Dead". The original staff were Game of Thrones experts through years of working on this, but Fansided...hired D-list local actors with no particular insight to host a poor copy of "The Talking Dead", which they called "The WiC.net Live Show" (airing "Live" after each episode). They didn't even tell the original writing staff they were going to do this until a week before the Season 4 premiere.

As insider reports from the writing staff later said...Fansided genuinely ran a truck off a cliff, and never paused to measure how much "content" they could plausibly produce relative to the astronomically high quotas they had set. Basically, they had...apparently assumed that their Live Show would be a runaway success on the scale of The Talking Dead...granted this TV show is as big, but they're not a cable TV channel! They don't have enough publicity to grow into something that big, that fast...even if they had great commentators, and not just average viewers who appeared on it for a pay check. Now you'd think they'd at least...wait a few weeks to see how it did, if the numbers grew. But apparently the numbers were so bad that by around the second episode of Season 4, they were outright horrified. How high did they assume the ratings would be, and how low did they have to really be in comparison, to justify being shocked by two weeks into it? Pretty low.

Not pulling enough revenue in to justify the expense of even making the Live Show, they started frantically producing other "filler" content to meet their website viewcount quotas. To stress: they never planned to do this, the writers who later quit stated that in a blind panic, the Fansided team started frantically producing fluff filler articles. One of these was the "Weapons of Westeros" video series...which was actually ripping off wiki articles (by the end, they were near-verbatim copies). **By the end, they resorted to making stories on "Tyrion flavored martinis, the Tiny Tyroni!" -- what does that even mean, a Tyrion "inspired" drink? Nor were they "reporting" on these drinks...they had the Live Show staff try to come up with alcoholic drink mixing tips. I mean they were just...total nonsequitors.

The original writing staff was being forced to prioritize the Live Show over their own written recaps and reviews of the episodes! That is, to police the comments sections, wasting time they needed to write their own material. It's...it's as if they were squatters on their own website. There was no communication between the two groups: the original writing staff, and the FanSided video team, who kept posting filler material because they had terrible ratings...to the point that they were copying from Game of Thrones Wiki.

The drinks videos were a real breaking point, the "Tiny Tyrioni" in particular was seen as Ableist and mocking Tyrion's disability...and when the original writing staffers complained they got yelled at. It was obvious they were no longer masters in their own house. Fansided had bought a major fansite, promptly sidelined the skilled writing staff they paid money to "buy", then hired D-list actors who just happened to watch the show, and assume that they could replace the original staff's writing quality?

So a few months after Season 4 ended, in August the entire writing staff of WinterIsComing.net - who had been working there since Season 1 - quit en masse and set up a new fansite, WatchersOnTheWall.com -- which is basically the OLD WiC.net in all but name. Direct comparisons were drawn to the Simpsons episode when the Stonecutters reform into the "No Homers Club". NO ONE remained behind.

Fansided stupidly abused a writing staff who had built that fansite...who were working for free, with no contract...and also never bothered to make them sign non-compete clauses in any contract. Normally a non-compete clause says that you can't quit and form a rival website. Had they bothered to invest any attention in the original, skilled writing staff, they wouldn't have made such a boneheaded and obvious oversight.

It stupidly never occurred to Fansided that all of the on-location reporters, set spies, and local sources in Northern Ireland and Croatia...were contacts the original writing staff personally developed and maintained, who had no loyalty or legal obligation to Fansided. When the original writing staff left, they took all of their unique local sources and contacts with them. Fansided truly never realized how precious the original writing staff was before alienating them by prioritizing their own crappy "Live Show" attempt - and by "crappy" I mean what Fansided admitted privately: it wasn't pulling in nearly enough ratings to sustain itself financially.

For the next couple of months through Christmas, "FanSided's WinterIsComing.net" (as we now call it to distinguish it from the original writing staff's previous work)...has gone through a revolving door of staffers and head editors-in-chief. Things have been a bit more stable since new years but...they're just a news aggregator now, repeating stuff other news sites like Entertainment Weekly or People.

HBO's publicity department also considers WatchersOnTheWall.com significant enough to give them advanced screener copies of episodes. The TV writers like Cogman know the writers on WatchersONTheWall.com.

Therefore, given that:

WatchersOnTheWall.com actually is the "WiC.net team" from the first four years of the TV show.

"Fansided's WinterIsComing.net" are morons, who have no idea how to run a news site and have no particularly insightful Game of Thrones commentary to make, and are now mostly just repeating other news sources anyway (to the point that their new hires have absent-mindedly reported on and linked to exclusive reports at WatchersOnTheWall.com itself).

Fansided's WinterIsComing.net has extensively plagiarized Game of Thrones Wiki material, infringing on the copyrights of our intellectual property, and made no attempt to either A - remove the content or B - at least put a disclaimer on it crediting the wiki

Fansided's WinterIscoming.net is blacklisted as a news source. We self-consciously hope that they will shut down entirely, as more and more readers realize that all of the original writers that built that original site simply rebranded as "WatchersOnTheWall.com". They are not welcome here or anywhere anymore. The internet chatter for the past year (on Westeros.org, reddit, etc.) is how Fansided is just a naked corporate grab at buying something they have no idea how to run. This isn't just "tense silence around them" - they are pariahs online and in fandom now. Hopefully soon they'll be just a memory.

So never link to them as a news source, or cite them in any article. If you see something they've linked to, just post the source (if you happen to see a WiC.net post linking to a Vogue article...why not just directly use the Vogue article?)...and it's unlikely they'll ever get exclusives again, the cast members gravitated to giving interviews with the original writers at WOTW.com (who they already knew, through four years of building up contacts!). In the unlikely even that they present some entirely new information, bring it to the attention of an Administrator here via our Talk pages so we can decide what to do.

Otherwise, continue further discussion on this matter at the forum link I posted above. I only made this repost here because I just archived the past several years worth of Talk page discussions on this Talk page for the wiki's Front Page, and I wanted to make sure casual users (who often check here first) would see it.--The Dragon Demands (talk) 22:57, April 12, 2015 (UTC)

Dear Lord, the "revolving door of Editors-in-Chief" continues over at WIC: it turns out that that Rowan Kaiser guy himself stopped working there after around the third episode of Season 5. So how many is that since the original writing staff left? I think Kaiser was the third one? And the other two were in the off season given that the break with the old writers happened after the Season 4 finale? Yikes, three episodes in and the Editor in Chief leaves? This stuff is comedy gold. I've also noticed that the specific commentator who was doing those "Weapons of Westeros" videos ripping off our wiki mysteriously did not return for this season, haha.--The Dragon Demands (talk) 00:41, June 10, 2015 (UTC)

I wish you hadn't changed the poll. It was more relevant since we finally just got to see the premiere after almost a year. QueenBuffy 16:35, April 13, 2015 (UTC)

Ack...you're right, I hadn't thought of this...in the off-season there was so little activity that the poll didn't seem that big, but now we might end up disagreeing on what to make as a new poll. Our traffic is higher in the on-season and we have more to discuss.

Well, the poll I took down was "how would you rate the most recent episode: Good, Bad, or Average?" -- Generally I think that most people who are reading a GOT wiki like the show, and those kinds of polls are kind of bland, compared to a specific question about the most recent episode, such as "Was Robb Stark right to execute Rickard Stark"? etc.

So I figured for the first episode of Season 5, given how unprecedented it is to have a flashback, why not ask, "what do you think of them using flashbacks? Was it too confusing or do you want more?"

...Every Sunday night in Season 5 we would probably need to discuss on the Talk page here what the next poll should be, before we change it. Yeah, I didn't think this through I was just jumping to get it changed.--The Dragon Demands (talk) 21:47, April 13, 2015 (UTC)

I think the episode 2 poll should be "Who would you have voted for in the Night's Watch election?

I don't know if Jon declines Stannis' offer in this episode, but if not, it could be "Should Jon accept Stannis's offer about the thing it is about." Or something like "What were your first thoughts about Dorne and Prince Doran?" But I like yours, we should use it. I don't think we need a third option for that, unless the show has more candidates. --Gladiatus (talk) 16:58, April 19, 2015 (UTC)

Unfortunately, spoilers reveal that whatever happens, it's not a cliffhanger left over for the next episode.

Er...what about "Should Daenerys show mercy to the insurgents in Meereen?"

Yeah, just saw the episode. I think the question about Dany and mercy would be good, or the one "who would you have voted for in the Night's Watch election." --Gladiatus (talk) 13:28, April 20, 2015 (UTC)

"Sansa marrying Ramsay is an invention of the TV series, in the novels she never even meets the Boltons, but remains in the Vale and out of the main plotlines. Do you think:

If they couldn't do Sansa's storyline from the books, they should have just had her not appear in Season 5 at all, the way they did with her brother Bran.

It was better to condense Sansa with the Bolton subplot so she actually gets important stuff to do in Season 5 - even if Sansa is being terrorized by Ramsay

It was better to condense Sansa with the Bolton subplot so she actually gets important stuff to do in Season 5 - and I suspect that Sansa is only pretending to be frightened by Ramsay, to lull him into a false sense of security.